Prisoners chained in a cave since childhood, watching shadows on a wall and giving them names. Plato's most famous image, in his own Greek.
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Plato's longest dialogue asks what justice is and builds an imaginary city to find out. In Book VII Socrates describes the Cave: people chained so that they see only shadows, one prisoner freed and dragged up into the sunlight, and his return to the ones who stayed below. We are pressing the Cave first. It isn't readable yet; your support is what starts it.
Plato wrote the Republic around 375 BC, in ten books, with Socrates as the main speaker a quarter of a century after his death. The conversation takes place in the Piraeus, the harbour town of Athens, at the house of the old shield-maker Cephalus, on the night of a new festival. Its first word in Greek is katebēn, I went down.
That opening verb comes back. Once the freed prisoner has seen the sun, Socrates insists that he has to go back down into the cave, and the Greek uses the same going-down. The whole book is framed as a descent. Word by word, you can also follow how Plato's words for seeing, shadow, image and form work on each other inside a single long paragraph.
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